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Slashback: NIC, Dastar, Defects
Was it ahead of its time or vice versa? BreadMan writes "After limping along for years, the New Internet Computer (NIC) company finally went under. Founded by Larry Ellison, NIC sold a diskless workstation running Linux targeted at home users that wanted internet access. From the spec sheet it looks like this would be fun as a hacking platform if you can get one on the cheap."
Way to GNU! xarium writes "Seems that in response to pressure from the FSF OpenTV has released the source code to all of its compilers. You can download the full package here (~18meg)."
Because a hard drive should not be a rhythm section.
Dynamoo writes "As previously noted in Slashdot, Fujitsu MPG3xx series hard drives have been failing in huge numbers. The U.S. law firm, Shepherd Finkelman Miller & Shah is currently conducting a class action against Fujitsu and HP for knowingly distributing faulty drives. According the this article in The Register, Gateway has now been lined up as a defendant.
The fault appears to impact MPG3102AT, MPG3204AT, MPG3307AT and MPG3409AT units manufactured in early 2001. If you have one of these, then it has probably failed already, if not you should replace it asap. If you're a customer of HP/Compaq you can visit the HP Hard Disk Drive Replacement Program site.
We had about 40 of these things fitted to Compaq DeskPro EXDs, and I can assure you the failure rate is pushing 100%."
In the public domain, no one knows you're a dog.
smiff writes "United Press International reports on Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox. Reversing lower court rulings, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Dastar did not violate the origin-of-work provision of the Lanham act. Dastar had taken public domain video, made some modifications, and sold it as its own product. Twentieth Century Fox sued claiming they should have been given credit for the video. According to Antonin Scalia, Dastar would have violated the Lanham Act if it had simply repacked the material and sold it as its own. But since Dastar made some minor changes, the Lanham Act doesn't apply.
While Dastar has been cleared under the Lanham Act, the Supreme Court sent the case back for a rehearing. The Fox video entered the public domain in 1977, but the book it was based on is still protected by copyright."
... or get off the pot. Brazilian Joe writes "The LinuxTag folks, as you may know, are responsible for a restraining order against SCO's claims in Germany. As a result, SCO has shut down its Germany web site. Story here."
I think it would be more effective to try to get the UnixGroup to file a restraining order banning SCO from the use of the "Unix" trademark. That would _really_ hit SCO where it hurts... imagine having to rewrite all of their code and promotional material to elimate the word "Unix"!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Hmmm... "We had about 40 of these things fitted to Compaq DeskPro EXDs, and I can assure you the failure rate is pushing 100%." While it may be true that the failure rate for these drives is very high, your annecdotal evidence doesn't tell you this. I don't know how many of these drives have been sold, but assuming it is in the 10,000+ range, then your sample size is way too low. So low that you can't draw any conclusions about the overall failure rate.
Nitpicking? Perhaps, but statistics are an important tool in lots of walks of life from politics to things that really matter like baseball. If the geeks can't use them correctly, what hope have we for the broader population?
Sailing over the event horizon
They are still claiming that they are not willing to license the patents to you for purposes of making derivatives. This directly contradicts the GPLthat they link to.
By agreeing to use the GPL they also must agree to license any OpenTV patents (royalty-free) that might be part of the OpenTV SDK.
SCO got sued for posting its corporate opinion of a technology matter, got sued by the people who they pissed off, and then got its web site shut down by the courts.
If it were anything other than SCO and Linux, this site would be condemning the decision and lamenting the loss of free speech rights.
I have noticed the distressing fact that people are only willing to apply the protection of free speech to the speech that they agree with.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
But as a computer it is fairly bad. The video is the worst offender - it uses shared RAM, and there are streaks all over the screen if some serious computations are performed (I tried to run distributed.net on it and gave up.)
The box is also abysmally slow, so much that it is basically unusable. As a browser... sure, it might just work - but who needs just a browser?
In any case, the box works for me as a player just fine, and I am glad that I have it. But it is also good that I found the right use for the thing... otherwise it would have been a total write-off. Don't buy one unless you know how you can use it.
Yeah, that is some pretty poor wording. Maybe something like: "the thief will soon discover that the machine has no black market resale value."
:-)
Of course, they also contradict themselves by saying "you won't lose any, because it can't work by itself"-- think about this. If some crackheads break into your offices, they're gonna grab as many of these things as they can carry. I doubt one of them will go, "Hey, wait, these are NETWORK computers!" And once the crackheads find out the things don't work, they'll end up in a dumpster, a rvier, or some muddy vacant lot.
Of course, who's to say these things didn't come with window stickers that say "Computers will not work if removed from premises."?
Bottom line, if a computer gets stolen, whether it works or not once it's off your premises, it's probably gone forever. The only plus side is that since it's a network computer, your valuable data won't be taken out the door unless the crackheads make off with your server as well.
~Philly
Feel free to do some research before crying foul play.
Source code is provided in that 18 meg zip file.
They ALSO will send you a CDROM with the source for a small fee.
Sometimes these things do pan out for us the consumers. When Iomega got class-actioned back in 1995 or '96 for supposedly selling faulty Zip drives, I got either a pack of Zip disks or a whole new drive (it was a while back, my memory is leaky) out of it. The kicker is, I never even signed up for membership in the class, because my unit was working just fine (still would be, probably, if I had it hooked up to anything). I was happily impressed.
Usually, though, you're right; the consumers get cheaped off with a $5.00 check or a coupon for more defective crap. I suppose the idea is to spank the offending company hard enough that they'll think twice about cutting corners the next time. I wonder if that tactic ever works?
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
Most class action lawsuits are settled in this manner. It beats a kick in the head, but is still pretty insulting. The law firm's part of the settlement is paid in cash. The legal system is pretty broken, I realize the motives of the businessmen who write about it almost weekly on the WSJ's editorial page, are less than pure, but they make a pretty good point, the system is broken and should be fixed. The last big settlement that I can remember that paid cash or other items of value to the defrauded was Lucent's shareholder settlement. I think the terms would still pretty much be a drop in the bucket, it was something like a few hundred million mostly in warrents (long term options), and investors in the class probably lost an order of magnitude more than that. I don't know, the class was limited to people who bought pretty late in the bubble, so it could have been relativly small.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
From the spec sheet it looks like this would be fun as a hacking platform
:)
It was more fun to hack the platform itself. For those not in the know, the NIC basically ran a highly customized Linux distro (seemed to have parts of RedHat, Debian, and others from what I could tell), all wrapped with a minimal window manager (enlightenment iirc), and Netscape as your entire front end. The whole thing booted off CD-ROM, and came with a 4mb flash drive to store configuration changes, bookmarks, etc. A nice handy web/email/irc box for grandma, or public access kiosks, or what have you. Oh, and before anyone asks, a stock Knoppix distro refused to run on it - at least when I tried it.
Now, the interesting part were some of the apps you could launch from it - telnet, and several other xterm-wrapped applications. Pretty powerful machine, all things considered - but there is NO command shell option. So of course, let's get one:
As I said, the distro it comes with is highly custom, a LOT of standard binaries aren't even on the CD, and it's been stripped to the essentials. But of course, we have our good friend Bash, just not direcly reachable. Easiest way I found was to escape out of a telnet session. Now, when you run its telnet client, you have a pop-up window asking you the hostname and port. This gets passed direcly to the telnet binary and ran. The designers actually went to the trouble to block the space bar being hit within this window (tricky devils! I'm sure some of you see where I'm going here), so we'll just use some copy & paste to have -e passed along with the hostname. This gives us an escape character within the telnet application itself, which (ta-da!) gives us a nice shell.
The fun part was trying to get some power. You're running as a pretty unprivledged user here, but hey! No shadowing of passwords! In any event, I got lazy and Googled a bit. No word of a lie, the root password on every last NIC that I've touched is (hard-coded on the CD, of course) "4getit". Clever, no?
Moral of the story: good thing these boxes never took off as public terminals. Takes about 30 seconds from boot to get root, and yes, the 4mb flash drive is just large enough for fun things like NetCat
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Taking the suggestion of a recent ./ story, you can also Search the SCO web site for "sco" and display the first 100 results.
Wget:
wget sco.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=sco&ps=100
I don't see it as hypocrisy at all.
Free speech never has included the blatant harassment of people or corporations, nor does it give person a license to slander or commit liable.
I could say, "Linux sucks". This is free speech. While I don't believe it does suck, it's far too subjective to be considered correct or incorrect. A statement like that does no harm in it self, and doesn't require quantifiable evidence.
I can also say, "Bill Gates is a foofoo head". This is protected under free speech. The statement does no harm in it self, there is no need to defend it by actually defining what a foofoo head is. foofoo - noun. see bill gates the foofoo head.
I can say, "SCO sucks because I have to license every trivial aspect of the OS including TCP/IP". This would be a true statement, while SCO might be offended at the fact I stated that it sucks, this is not the norm. With Solaris, BSD, and Linux out there, it does indeed suck the fact that you have to pay license fees for the SCO product in anyway.
But SCO can not order companies to stop using Linux based under the assumption they own some piece of IP in it without establishing first their ownership. If they owned the property, then they could. But as it was shown in a German court they can't prove that, then they can not. This amounts to no less then extortion and deformation of character, both of which free speech does not protect. No more then I can say, "You stupid motherfucker" unless I happened to be speaking to Edipus.
There is a big difference between opinion and fact. SCO presented information as a fact, and demanded something in return.
It's not like the website was shut down without cause, but the issue was brought to court because of the issues of criminal extortion and deformation of Linux as a legitimate product. If they left it as an opinion, it might be protected under free speech. And you just can't do that. You can't make statements that damage people that simply are not true.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Btw, i have yet to have any of my 5 ibm hds fail due to mfgr defects. 1 ultrastar, 4 de(ath|sk)stars. But i did manage to kill one accidentially after the PoS Psu sorted and killed the on-board ctrlr of a 20 GB drive. After getting some really good "this will most definitely void your warranty, but...." advice from HGST tech support, I managed to get a similar drive off ebay for $50. LMAO, the replacement parts joints want $200 for it, and the DriveSaver types want $1000-5000 depending. (Damn, I should go into biz then, charge $300 each, GDR - Ghetto Data Recovery, "we do everything but open the drive") HGST/Fujistu/IBM said the only thing that mattered is that the MLC codes should match (on the label). There are 3-5 MLC's per model, equally distributed. I changed the ctrlr from the live to dead, and "It's alive!!!!" No data loss! :) Needless to say I imeddiately dd'ed that sucker. It still works, but I dont trust this drive anylonger for anything of value.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
> As a browser... sure, it might just work - but who needs just a browser?
Agreed. For $300, I'd rather put it towards a low end dell. I've seen Dell's Dimension 2350 as low as $314 on the bargain sites (after rebates and coupons) with free shipping that more than double its features. Even HP/Compaq has a a 2GHz system for $349 AR (shipping not free, though). These are fully functional computers, people.
Even thought the IBM is about contractual considerations this is good new for Linux, as it looks like SCO indeed do not own the IP.
For the ones that watches PBS and Chalie Rose, Note that he has David Boies as guest tonight plus Andy Groove by the way.
Hopefully Charlie will ask Boies about IP terrorism, at least I send him an email asking him to.
Help fight continental drift.
Childish? Yes. Immature? Definately. Fun? Oh yeah.
(But damn, either every ISP is caching this, or they have the ballsiest servers ever. I'm not kidding, this stuff is coming down faster than damn near anything else I've ever downloaded.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It wasn't meant to do everything you do with your pc. But it did just enough for most people.
The problem was a poor h/w design from the get-go and rush to manufacture that poor design. Couple that with shit production forecasts, you've got the makings of a major problem.
What most people don't know is that the h/w was upgraded to the Via Epia 733Mhz mobo and was smooth as silk. And the box was quiet because we didn't need fans anymore. We never got a chance to release it to the public. Hell, we were just finishing the build that could run off CD, hdd, PXE, or even large flash ram (128mb).
The money ran out trying to recover from the prior bad decision making and as a business move, I wouldn't have pumped more money into it unless there were major changes in management. But that's just me....
does show that Novell retains the rights to all the UNIX patents and copyrights
Ahh, but the point of the article is that the contract is much more complicated than this. People will read your post and think "see, there, SCO does not own the IP, there is no case." But the article goes to great lengths to show that SCO may have the right to ENFORCE the copyright even if they don't have the copyright itself. This admittedly seems odd, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible, in which case SCO would be able to sue everybody's pants off and legally reap the benefits of the copyright without technically holding it:
For example, while the contract leaves the copyrights with Novell, a section that gives to SCO "all claims...against any parties relating to any right, property or asset included in the (Unix) business" could be interpreted to give SCO the right to enforce the copyright, Radcliffe said. "The question is, even though (Novell) didn't assign the intellectual property (to SCO), did (Novell) assign the rights to enforce the patents and copyrights?"
I'm not surprised that NIC died, since "network computers" never made a whole lot of sense to me anyway. For some years now, PCs have been cheap enough that most people who want or need one can afford one. Sure, a lot of people use their computers mostly for e-mail and browsing the web, but what do you do if you only have one of these pared down machines and you want to, for example, edit a photograph? It's like having a moped (scooter, motorino, whatever): it's only really useful if you already have a car, or if you only ever go two or three streets over (I'm talking about in the U.S. here ... European countries, that's a different story). Anyway, this should be a lesson to all of us: when somebody says that the "next big thing" is going to be a crippled version of what we already have, don't believe it.